Material Design Awards 2019 Winners are Here

You've probably never heard of this one, but each year, Google awards the Material Design Prize to 4 apps from the Play Store. No quantifiable method is used to award these rewards. They are simply attributed to the four applications that Google expects to use in an excellent way its design language. The winners for 2021 have been announced and they are all relatively unknown applications. I'm not surprised, because most well-designed apps never become as popular as some poorly designed apps. These are the 4 applications that won the 2020 Material Design Awards based on standards such as experience, universality, innovation and thematization.

Winners of the Material Design Awards 2021

Trip.com (for Universality)

As you can see, Trip.com is a travel app but, unlike most others, it's designed to not seem cluttered. The application uses a hardware design and optimizes the use of white space. This makes everything much cleaner and better spaced. The application allows you to not only search for tourist destinations that you should visit, but also to book flights from the application. Trip.com also allows you to book hotels, find deals and even rent cars. In China, the United Kingdom and some other countries, it also allows you to book train tickets. The design flow of the application greatly facilitates the use. As a result, users do not have to search for things or understand how they work. Exclusive members can take advantage of special offers and zero booking fees on flights and hotels.

Scripts (for the experiment)

You have probably already seen a ton of apps focused on teaching different languages ​​to users. However, they are all mainly focused on the spoken language. The Scripts application allows users to learn to write in other languages ​​with the help of hardware design in order to create a pleasant and easy to navigate application experience. Scripts presents a step by step drawing guide with clear instructions and a line order with animations and a haptic feedback. All of this combines to make an excellent learning experience. The app can use a hardware design, but it's also a minimalist design where the user interface tries to stay out of your way. Apart from all this, the application manages to remain consistent with typography despite the support of such diverse languages. Some are Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Latin, etc.

Ruff (for Theming)

Ruff is a basic note-taking application and there is no shortage of applications of this type that make good use of hardware design guidelines. The initial layout is simplistic, as you can see on the screenshots, but users can customize this and the themes as they please. Once you have written something, you can simply swipe from the right to save or store it. Ruff acts like a continuous sheet of paper, so all your notes are simply superimposed on each other in a timeline. It's also available for Chromebooks and has a dark theme in case you need to write in the dark. Ruff is a very minimal application with a blank backdrop that invites you to write, while the curved corners of the bottom sheet and handlebars can reveal more information by sliding on it.

Reflectly (for innovation)

Reflectly is a logging application and, before refusing, listen to us. At some point in our lives, many of us felt like we were starting to write a newspaper because it's a good thing to do. But then you start and it seems stupid maybe or you are bored and stop doing it. Reflectly encourages you to continue doing this, unlike any other similar application. On the one hand, it is designed to keep things calm and fun instead of looking like a boring newspaper. It uses various prompts of a conversational user interface powered by the AI.

All these apps won the Google Material Design Awards of 2020. Google offers no cash prizes to the developers of these apps. Developers receive an elegant statuette and their applications are displayed on a dedicated page.

If you're interested in what Google said about these apps, you can check it on the official source page.